MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY - The following are a few selected excerpts from my autobiography, Positively Dazzling Realism, mostly from chapters that discuss general issues and actions not addressed on other pages of this website.
The book contains detailed stories and descriptions from my life and actions on all the issues touched on by the essays and photographs on these pages. At present, the text is available only in a digital PDF from [email protected] , but I plan to have an edited 3rd printing available in a print edition sometime in early 2021:
The book contains detailed stories and descriptions from my life and actions on all the issues touched on by the essays and photographs on these pages. At present, the text is available only in a digital PDF from [email protected] , but I plan to have an edited 3rd printing available in a print edition sometime in early 2021:
Positively Dazzling Realism
THE FURTHER INVENTION OF NONVIOLENCE,
FOR THE ABOLITION OF WAR
KARL MEYER
An Autobiography
“Let us suppose that certain individuals resolve that they will consistently oppose to power the force of example; to authority, exhortation; to insult, friendly reasoning; to trickery, simple honor. Let us suppose they refuse all the advantages of present-day society and accept only the duties and obligations that bind them to others. Let us suppose they devote themselves to orienting education, the press and public opinion toward the principles outlined here. Then I say that such people would be acting not as Utopians but as honest realists. They would be preparing the future and at the same time knocking down a few of the walls that imprison us today. If realism be the art of taking into account both the present and the future, of gaining the most while sacrificing the least, then who can fail to see the positively dazzling realism of such behavior?”
Albert Camus – Neither Victims Nor Executioners – 1946 – Combat
[ translated from the French by Dwight Macdonald ]
“Another man with whom I was arguing the other day declared to me, ’You can’t turn the clock back now to nonviolence!’ Turn the clock back? The clock has been turned to violence all down through history. Resort to violence hardly marks a move forward. It is nonviolence which is in the process of invention, if only people would not stop short in that experiment…It is for that spirit of invention that I plead.”
Barbara Deming –We Are All Part of One Another – 1984 – page 171
Albert Camus – Neither Victims Nor Executioners – 1946 – Combat
[ translated from the French by Dwight Macdonald ]
“Another man with whom I was arguing the other day declared to me, ’You can’t turn the clock back now to nonviolence!’ Turn the clock back? The clock has been turned to violence all down through history. Resort to violence hardly marks a move forward. It is nonviolence which is in the process of invention, if only people would not stop short in that experiment…It is for that spirit of invention that I plead.”
Barbara Deming –We Are All Part of One Another – 1984 – page 171
Preface
Accepting the nomination of his party to run for a second term in 1936, one year before my birth, President Franklin D. Roosevelt said of his contemporaries, “This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.“
I was to be a child of the Atomic Age, raised in the shadow of the mushroom clouds that rose over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, at the end of his “war for democracy“. I was eight years old when “Little Boy“ fell from the bomb bay of the Enola Gay into the air above Hiroshima. In an editorial for August 20, 1945, the editors of Life magazine wrote, “The individual conscience against the atomic bomb? Yes, there is no other way.” Was it to my conscience that they were speaking?
Yes, for I was also a child of Gandhi's century. I was ten years old when he was assassinated on January 30, 1948. My mother talked to us about him as we listened to news reports, and I began to read about him that year. Dream and vocation took root in me. Abolition of war was to become the most persistent thread of meaning and action in my life over the sixty-eight years that have unrolled since then. I came to believe that my generation, and I in particular, must press resolutely toward our rendezvous with destiny.
That same year I wrote a precocious letter to Secretary of State George C. Marshall, urging him to ensure that atomic bombs would never be used again. He did not reply. I hoped fervently that war – international and civil - would be abolished within my lifetime, to be replaced almost completely by effective institutions of law, mediation, and arbitration. This would be the “positively dazzling realism” of which Camus wrote in 1946, reflecting on the horrors of World War II and his own experiences in the violent underground French resistance to Hitler's Germany.
Through adolescence and early youth I was moved by both universal compassion and personal ambition to play a central role in this social process – and naively believed that I might.
This book is a story of my fitful, yet persistent, efforts to make valuable contributions toward a peaceful world, with justice for all. Experience kept bringing me back to an evolving awareness of how human psychology and cultural history make it so difficult to progress toward such obvious and reasonable goals. I also came, reluctantly, to acknowledge my personal limitations as a potential teacher and leader. In this evolution, I always held doggedly to a belief that any success worth having must come within an honest understanding of reality, and whatever I believed to be true about human community. Any success achieved through lies, self-deception or any form of betrayal or cruelty, would be worse than failure.
Another thread running persistently through my life (and shared in common with most people) has been my longing for love and intimate friendship. It took me well into midlife to find satisfying answers to this "problem of love”. Mine have not been conventional solutions, so I feel that my experiences and evolving ideas, as told in middle chapters of this text, may be helpful to others.
Such were my early dreams, hopes and ambitions.
Sixty Years Later
William Butler Yeats, in “Sailing to Byzantium”, writes:
“An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress...”
Now, at age seventy-eight, I work to complete a story of my time to date within Earth. Always a child of extravagant dreams, I hope that this book may be both interesting and edifying to my grandchildren's generation, and perhaps others to come. I sit often at my window looking into a garden of Eden. Early in May sour cherries turn to gold and red; lettuce, beans and onions flourish in full growth; rain drips from the gutters onto emerald grass; blackberry bushes bloom; cardinals, blackbirds, doves, forage among the trees and vegetable beds; grape vines and the fig tree at my window are in full leaf.
Yeats again, in “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”, sings:
“I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
“And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.
“I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.”
On the one hand, I feel that mine has been among the luckiest and most successful lives. I have learned to live as a healthy human being within Earth, often helping others along the way, with a minimum of harm to other beings that also want to live and thrive. That is a fine, though modest, definition of success for one person. Years ago, during the Vietnam War, I copied down words of Murray Kempton: “A great man is one who knows that he was not put on earth to be part of a process through which a child can be hurt.”
Yet, I have also a sorrowful sense of failure and defeat. As a child, over sixty years ago, my dreams and hopes for the good of humanity were so ambitious as to be messianic. I have had to learn how little and how slowly we humans achieve wisdom and progress together. About three thousand years ago the Prophet Micah promised that his god would rebuke strong nations until they beat their swords into plowshares, and they would not learn war anymore.
Then everyone would sit under his vine and fig tree, and no one would make them afraid. I sit near my vines and fig tree, without fear of anything, except, sometimes, the approach of my own death. Yet, around the world countless millions sit in squalid refugee camps, under the dark shadow of war, not knowing whether or when they may ever return to their homes and farms without fear.
To lighten the scourge of human violence is a sacred vocation calling to every idealistic realist of emerging generations, who will be ready to take up the challenge from my generation, and that of our children. I hope to work with you as long as I may have a kernel of creative energy left in me.
I was to be a child of the Atomic Age, raised in the shadow of the mushroom clouds that rose over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, at the end of his “war for democracy“. I was eight years old when “Little Boy“ fell from the bomb bay of the Enola Gay into the air above Hiroshima. In an editorial for August 20, 1945, the editors of Life magazine wrote, “The individual conscience against the atomic bomb? Yes, there is no other way.” Was it to my conscience that they were speaking?
Yes, for I was also a child of Gandhi's century. I was ten years old when he was assassinated on January 30, 1948. My mother talked to us about him as we listened to news reports, and I began to read about him that year. Dream and vocation took root in me. Abolition of war was to become the most persistent thread of meaning and action in my life over the sixty-eight years that have unrolled since then. I came to believe that my generation, and I in particular, must press resolutely toward our rendezvous with destiny.
That same year I wrote a precocious letter to Secretary of State George C. Marshall, urging him to ensure that atomic bombs would never be used again. He did not reply. I hoped fervently that war – international and civil - would be abolished within my lifetime, to be replaced almost completely by effective institutions of law, mediation, and arbitration. This would be the “positively dazzling realism” of which Camus wrote in 1946, reflecting on the horrors of World War II and his own experiences in the violent underground French resistance to Hitler's Germany.
Through adolescence and early youth I was moved by both universal compassion and personal ambition to play a central role in this social process – and naively believed that I might.
This book is a story of my fitful, yet persistent, efforts to make valuable contributions toward a peaceful world, with justice for all. Experience kept bringing me back to an evolving awareness of how human psychology and cultural history make it so difficult to progress toward such obvious and reasonable goals. I also came, reluctantly, to acknowledge my personal limitations as a potential teacher and leader. In this evolution, I always held doggedly to a belief that any success worth having must come within an honest understanding of reality, and whatever I believed to be true about human community. Any success achieved through lies, self-deception or any form of betrayal or cruelty, would be worse than failure.
Another thread running persistently through my life (and shared in common with most people) has been my longing for love and intimate friendship. It took me well into midlife to find satisfying answers to this "problem of love”. Mine have not been conventional solutions, so I feel that my experiences and evolving ideas, as told in middle chapters of this text, may be helpful to others.
Such were my early dreams, hopes and ambitions.
Sixty Years Later
William Butler Yeats, in “Sailing to Byzantium”, writes:
“An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress...”
Now, at age seventy-eight, I work to complete a story of my time to date within Earth. Always a child of extravagant dreams, I hope that this book may be both interesting and edifying to my grandchildren's generation, and perhaps others to come. I sit often at my window looking into a garden of Eden. Early in May sour cherries turn to gold and red; lettuce, beans and onions flourish in full growth; rain drips from the gutters onto emerald grass; blackberry bushes bloom; cardinals, blackbirds, doves, forage among the trees and vegetable beds; grape vines and the fig tree at my window are in full leaf.
Yeats again, in “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”, sings:
“I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
“And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.
“I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.”
On the one hand, I feel that mine has been among the luckiest and most successful lives. I have learned to live as a healthy human being within Earth, often helping others along the way, with a minimum of harm to other beings that also want to live and thrive. That is a fine, though modest, definition of success for one person. Years ago, during the Vietnam War, I copied down words of Murray Kempton: “A great man is one who knows that he was not put on earth to be part of a process through which a child can be hurt.”
Yet, I have also a sorrowful sense of failure and defeat. As a child, over sixty years ago, my dreams and hopes for the good of humanity were so ambitious as to be messianic. I have had to learn how little and how slowly we humans achieve wisdom and progress together. About three thousand years ago the Prophet Micah promised that his god would rebuke strong nations until they beat their swords into plowshares, and they would not learn war anymore.
Then everyone would sit under his vine and fig tree, and no one would make them afraid. I sit near my vines and fig tree, without fear of anything, except, sometimes, the approach of my own death. Yet, around the world countless millions sit in squalid refugee camps, under the dark shadow of war, not knowing whether or when they may ever return to their homes and farms without fear.
To lighten the scourge of human violence is a sacred vocation calling to every idealistic realist of emerging generations, who will be ready to take up the challenge from my generation, and that of our children. I hope to work with you as long as I may have a kernel of creative energy left in me.
Ideas on Religious Faith
A Summary
In my chapter, Being Within Earth, (a manifesto of my beliefs that I wrote in 1995), I discuss the evolution of my own religious beliefs up to that time, but I want to summarize here the religious positions I have come to at this late point in life.
Most people would agree that truth is an important value, central to human life and action. It is ethically important to profess that which we perceive to be true, rather than lie to ourselves or others about what we see and believe. However, perception and belief are mental reconstructions of external reality, and though human minds are similar, they are also individual and different, so it has always been difficult to agree on what we individually perceive and believe to be true. It has been easier to reach general agreement on objective phenomena that can be seen, heard, touched and measured in the physical world.
Religious beliefs about unseen gods, who were believed to have various powers over the origins and operations of the universe and human destiny, seem to be central to every known human culture from before the beginnings of history. Spirituality and beliefs about gods are still of great importance in the lives of many, or most, people today.
I believe that any spirituality that can be respected must begin with honesty to ourselves and to others about what we truly believe about the origins of the universe and the forces governing our existence. Emerging from an agnostic Protestant family background, in which social ethics were valued but theological beliefs were undefined and seldom discussed, I became a devout practicing Catholic at the age of nineteen, and remained so for about fifteen years, as I immersed myself in the culture and values of the Catholic Worker movement.
I accepted the ethical doctrines of sincere Catholic Christianity, but it seems to me that I never truly believed the theological doctrines professed in the Apostles Creed that we recited weekly or daily at Mass. I liked being Catholic, and I am still partial to the Catholic Church and Catholic faith, among Christian denominations and other religions of the world, but I simply do not believe that their theological and cosmological beliefs are true.
I moved away from professing Catholic faith in the early 1970s, when I saw myself parting company with Catholic doctrines on sexuality and marriage. For years after that I defined myself as agnostic (without knowledge of gods), and atheist (without a god or gods of my own).
Several years ago I realized I could also define myself as a pantheist: I believe in the existence of all the gods; they are very important in human cultures and many of them will endure and be around long after I am gone; but I believe that all of them, without exception, were created in human minds and exist only in human minds and in human cultures. I find some gods far better than others, and some conceptions of the Christian "God" far better than others.
However, in the light of current scientific knowledge and rational thought, I now regard most theological religious beliefs as nonsense. Still, a large proportion of world populations appear to believe that their theologies are actually true, or at least find it emotionally, psychologically, and socially essential to profess belief. I should be able to understand and appreciate this, as, for a long period in my youth, I professed belief in Catholic religious doctrines, and conscientiously followed the ethics and practices of my religion, so well in fact that I was given awards by both the conservative Catholic Archbishop of Chicago, and by a leading progressive opposition movement within the Church.
I feel great awe and reverence for the beauty and complexity of the living organism of Earth, and for the immensity of the physical Universe, or Universes of which contemporary cosmologists tell us, but I believe it merely confuses and distorts the meaning of words to conflate such feelings of awe and reverence for the processes of nature with traditional ideas about spiritual beings or gods believed to be active in nature, or transcendent over nature.
This is the clearest concise summary I can give of my religious beliefs today.
Most people would agree that truth is an important value, central to human life and action. It is ethically important to profess that which we perceive to be true, rather than lie to ourselves or others about what we see and believe. However, perception and belief are mental reconstructions of external reality, and though human minds are similar, they are also individual and different, so it has always been difficult to agree on what we individually perceive and believe to be true. It has been easier to reach general agreement on objective phenomena that can be seen, heard, touched and measured in the physical world.
Religious beliefs about unseen gods, who were believed to have various powers over the origins and operations of the universe and human destiny, seem to be central to every known human culture from before the beginnings of history. Spirituality and beliefs about gods are still of great importance in the lives of many, or most, people today.
I believe that any spirituality that can be respected must begin with honesty to ourselves and to others about what we truly believe about the origins of the universe and the forces governing our existence. Emerging from an agnostic Protestant family background, in which social ethics were valued but theological beliefs were undefined and seldom discussed, I became a devout practicing Catholic at the age of nineteen, and remained so for about fifteen years, as I immersed myself in the culture and values of the Catholic Worker movement.
I accepted the ethical doctrines of sincere Catholic Christianity, but it seems to me that I never truly believed the theological doctrines professed in the Apostles Creed that we recited weekly or daily at Mass. I liked being Catholic, and I am still partial to the Catholic Church and Catholic faith, among Christian denominations and other religions of the world, but I simply do not believe that their theological and cosmological beliefs are true.
I moved away from professing Catholic faith in the early 1970s, when I saw myself parting company with Catholic doctrines on sexuality and marriage. For years after that I defined myself as agnostic (without knowledge of gods), and atheist (without a god or gods of my own).
Several years ago I realized I could also define myself as a pantheist: I believe in the existence of all the gods; they are very important in human cultures and many of them will endure and be around long after I am gone; but I believe that all of them, without exception, were created in human minds and exist only in human minds and in human cultures. I find some gods far better than others, and some conceptions of the Christian "God" far better than others.
However, in the light of current scientific knowledge and rational thought, I now regard most theological religious beliefs as nonsense. Still, a large proportion of world populations appear to believe that their theologies are actually true, or at least find it emotionally, psychologically, and socially essential to profess belief. I should be able to understand and appreciate this, as, for a long period in my youth, I professed belief in Catholic religious doctrines, and conscientiously followed the ethics and practices of my religion, so well in fact that I was given awards by both the conservative Catholic Archbishop of Chicago, and by a leading progressive opposition movement within the Church.
I feel great awe and reverence for the beauty and complexity of the living organism of Earth, and for the immensity of the physical Universe, or Universes of which contemporary cosmologists tell us, but I believe it merely confuses and distorts the meaning of words to conflate such feelings of awe and reverence for the processes of nature with traditional ideas about spiritual beings or gods believed to be active in nature, or transcendent over nature.
This is the clearest concise summary I can give of my religious beliefs today.
Excerpts from my chapter on my pro se defense guidelines, as prepared for briefing of School of the Americas trespass defendants in 2002:
My Pro Se Defense Guidelines
The legal team decided to hold three days of preparatory meetings, briefings and getting acquainted. Impressed with my pro se defense in 2001, they invited me to come to Columbus to participate in the discussions and help people interested in representing themselves understand what to expect in courts, jails and prisons. I prepared two briefing papers on handling one's own case.
The first was on use of Rule 20 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, which provides in part, "a defendant arrested, held or present in a district other than that in which an indictment or information is pending against him, may state in writing that he wishes to plead guilty or nolo contendere, to waive trial in the district in which the indictment or information is pending, and to consent to disposition of the case in the district in which he was arrested, held, or present, subject to the approval of the United States Attorney for each district."
This option might be useful to a defendant far away from Columbus, who might wish to avoid traveling all the way back to Columbus for trial, and be willing to plead guilty or nolo contendere in the district where they resided. This could be done only with the approval of the United States Attorney for the district where the offense occurred. A U.S. Magistrate Judge for a district other than Georgia might be inclined to take entry to Fort Benning less seriously than a Magistrate in Columbus, and far less inclined to hand out a sentence of six months in prison.
Kathy Kelly and I had used this option to plead nolo in Chicago and Nashville rather than return to Panama City, Florida, and Magistrates in Chicago and Nashville were very lenient with us, not sending us to jail at all. However, in a letter to Bill Quigley, the Assistant U. S. Attorney in Columbus, Dean Gaskell, wrote that he would not agree to transfer any of these cases to any other federal district.
I also presented a three-page paper entitled “Notes on Pro Se Defense”, in which I summarized general principles and ideas on defending oneself in court. Pro se defense is personally empowering when people learn about the legal process and decide to speak for themselves in court.
The Constitution and the law allow people to do this. It had been my experience that judges in local courts were respectful and patient with a pro se defendant who showed some familiarity with legal principles and was careful to present only relevant evidence and arguments, but judges could become impatient and arbitrary if people presented long-winded defenses that seemed legally irrelevant. There is often a large difference between the way legal process is supposed to work in principle and the way it is actually practiced by judges in crowded local courts.
I got much of my understanding of actual court process from always sitting near the front and listening very intently to all of the other cases that might be heard in the court, before my own case was called, Thus I could get an idea of how the legal process actually worked in each court.
Often prosecutors, public defenders, and hired lawyers are not careful to debrief witnesses and their case is poorly presented. The defendant knows much more about the facts than the prosecutor, and usually remembers more than the arresting officers. I pointed out the importance of making careful notes of everything said between arresting officer and defendant, at the time of the arrest, and of all other factual circumstances.
Make careful notes immediately after the arrest when one's memory is still clear, and realize that the arresting officer may have little memory of what happened by the time the case comes to trial, and probably will have no notes at all.
Before trial, defendants should think carefully about every aspect of the arrest situation, and prepare written questions to ask the witnesses about every aspect that might be legally relevant. In mass arrest situations, like that at Fort Benning, there will be many officers involved in arresting people; often these officers will have no documentation of individual arrests they made; often only one or two officers will appear as witnesses against all defendants arrested; so, they have no personal memory of individual arrests.
There are three major sources of weakness in prosecuting civil protest cases that can often be exposed through pro se defense, or defense by a lawyer:
FACTS: Arresting officers sometimes exaggerate, misrepresent, or lie about the facts in arrest situations in order to justify the arrest and obtain a conviction. Those errors can be revealed by careful cross examination, and the honest testimony of the defendant and other defense witnesses.
LAW: Officers often arrest people for legal protest activities protected by law and the Constitution, because the activities annoy officers, property owners or government officials who want them stopped. Often officers do not know what laws they are supposedly enforcing. When they get back to the police station they ask superior officers, or search in their code books, to figure out what charge to bring, whether disorderly conduct, trespassing, or resisting a police officer.
Defendants should always get a copy of the charges citing the section of law under which they are charged. Go to a law library or public library and look up the sections of the code or regulations allegedly violated to find out what the law actually says and to see whether the charge matches the facts of what actually occurred. For instance, disorderly conduct charges are often dismissed by judges after police witnesses concede that a protest was completely peaceful and orderly.
Trespassing charges are often dismissed after the prosecution witnesses concede that commercial or public property was open to the public and the defendants were arrested without being notified that they were trespassing, or were not allowed to leave the property after being notified. Resisting arrest charges are then dismissed after showing that the legal definition of resisting in the particular statute does not include arguing with a police officer or passive noncooperation, such as going limp, or failure to show I.D. or give one's name.
CONSTITUTION: Local ordinances frequently conflict with generally accepted interpretations of the U.S. Constitution, or state constitutions. Sometimes judges can be persuaded to override local and state statutes and regulations if the defendants present a clear defense appealing to the broad freedoms of religion, speech, press and public assembly guaranteed in the U.S. and state constitutions.
Over the years I won cases when I showed judges that the facts did not support conviction, that the law under which I was charged did not match the facts or the description of my conduct as charged in the police complaint, or that the arrest was for actions protected by the Constitution of the United States or a state constitution.
At my trial in 2001 for illegal re-entry to Fort Benning the prosecutor presented seven witnesses, yet none testified to the actual time, place or circumstances of my individual arrest.
The testimony of the witnesses did not support a conviction. I also made an eloquent constitutional defense based on the freedom to assemble at a base that is otherwise open 24 hours a day 365 days a year for every other kind of normal activity, many not privileged by the Constitution, yet Judge Faircloth still found me guilty without any explanation of his reasoning, and imposed the maximum sentence of six months.
This led me to a key piece of advice in my memo: No defendant whether pro se or represented by a lawyer should naively assume that a judge will conscientiously follow the law, the Constitution, or accepted legal procedures of the American judicial system. Defendants may be convicted when they have committed no illegal acts, or they may be acquitted for various reasons even though they may have committed an act that was illegal.
My memo concluded by saying that anyone new to pro se defense could benefit greatly from discussing their case thoroughly with experienced pro se defendants or lawyers familiar with civil protest cases, although sometimes discussions with lawyers who do not have practical experience with such cases can be misleading rather than helpful. Over the last thirty-four years since I first started representing myself and pleading not guilty in most nonviolent civil action cases, a count of my trial record showed that I pleaded guilty seven times and not guilty twenty-nine times.
Of those cases, twelve were dismissed before trial on motion of the prosecutor or judge because they didn't want to prosecute or felt that a conviction would not be warranted. I was acquitted in eight cases, convicted in eight others, and had one outstanding warrant for a case in which I did not return for trial.
After the preparatory briefings and meetings I did not stay in Columbus for the trials which extended for a whole week. Of thirty-seven defendants only one was found not guilty, on what grounds, I don't know. The rest were convicted by Judge Faircloth and sentenced from six months of probation to six months in prison. Most reported at federal prisons when notified, but five went into custody immediately and began their sentences in Georgia county jails.
The work of the legal team led by Bill Quigley was particularly commendable in this case, and Bill would go on to provide thoughtful and effective representation and help for civil protest defendants in many other cases around the country in subsequent years.
The first was on use of Rule 20 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, which provides in part, "a defendant arrested, held or present in a district other than that in which an indictment or information is pending against him, may state in writing that he wishes to plead guilty or nolo contendere, to waive trial in the district in which the indictment or information is pending, and to consent to disposition of the case in the district in which he was arrested, held, or present, subject to the approval of the United States Attorney for each district."
This option might be useful to a defendant far away from Columbus, who might wish to avoid traveling all the way back to Columbus for trial, and be willing to plead guilty or nolo contendere in the district where they resided. This could be done only with the approval of the United States Attorney for the district where the offense occurred. A U.S. Magistrate Judge for a district other than Georgia might be inclined to take entry to Fort Benning less seriously than a Magistrate in Columbus, and far less inclined to hand out a sentence of six months in prison.
Kathy Kelly and I had used this option to plead nolo in Chicago and Nashville rather than return to Panama City, Florida, and Magistrates in Chicago and Nashville were very lenient with us, not sending us to jail at all. However, in a letter to Bill Quigley, the Assistant U. S. Attorney in Columbus, Dean Gaskell, wrote that he would not agree to transfer any of these cases to any other federal district.
I also presented a three-page paper entitled “Notes on Pro Se Defense”, in which I summarized general principles and ideas on defending oneself in court. Pro se defense is personally empowering when people learn about the legal process and decide to speak for themselves in court.
The Constitution and the law allow people to do this. It had been my experience that judges in local courts were respectful and patient with a pro se defendant who showed some familiarity with legal principles and was careful to present only relevant evidence and arguments, but judges could become impatient and arbitrary if people presented long-winded defenses that seemed legally irrelevant. There is often a large difference between the way legal process is supposed to work in principle and the way it is actually practiced by judges in crowded local courts.
I got much of my understanding of actual court process from always sitting near the front and listening very intently to all of the other cases that might be heard in the court, before my own case was called, Thus I could get an idea of how the legal process actually worked in each court.
Often prosecutors, public defenders, and hired lawyers are not careful to debrief witnesses and their case is poorly presented. The defendant knows much more about the facts than the prosecutor, and usually remembers more than the arresting officers. I pointed out the importance of making careful notes of everything said between arresting officer and defendant, at the time of the arrest, and of all other factual circumstances.
Make careful notes immediately after the arrest when one's memory is still clear, and realize that the arresting officer may have little memory of what happened by the time the case comes to trial, and probably will have no notes at all.
Before trial, defendants should think carefully about every aspect of the arrest situation, and prepare written questions to ask the witnesses about every aspect that might be legally relevant. In mass arrest situations, like that at Fort Benning, there will be many officers involved in arresting people; often these officers will have no documentation of individual arrests they made; often only one or two officers will appear as witnesses against all defendants arrested; so, they have no personal memory of individual arrests.
There are three major sources of weakness in prosecuting civil protest cases that can often be exposed through pro se defense, or defense by a lawyer:
FACTS: Arresting officers sometimes exaggerate, misrepresent, or lie about the facts in arrest situations in order to justify the arrest and obtain a conviction. Those errors can be revealed by careful cross examination, and the honest testimony of the defendant and other defense witnesses.
LAW: Officers often arrest people for legal protest activities protected by law and the Constitution, because the activities annoy officers, property owners or government officials who want them stopped. Often officers do not know what laws they are supposedly enforcing. When they get back to the police station they ask superior officers, or search in their code books, to figure out what charge to bring, whether disorderly conduct, trespassing, or resisting a police officer.
Defendants should always get a copy of the charges citing the section of law under which they are charged. Go to a law library or public library and look up the sections of the code or regulations allegedly violated to find out what the law actually says and to see whether the charge matches the facts of what actually occurred. For instance, disorderly conduct charges are often dismissed by judges after police witnesses concede that a protest was completely peaceful and orderly.
Trespassing charges are often dismissed after the prosecution witnesses concede that commercial or public property was open to the public and the defendants were arrested without being notified that they were trespassing, or were not allowed to leave the property after being notified. Resisting arrest charges are then dismissed after showing that the legal definition of resisting in the particular statute does not include arguing with a police officer or passive noncooperation, such as going limp, or failure to show I.D. or give one's name.
CONSTITUTION: Local ordinances frequently conflict with generally accepted interpretations of the U.S. Constitution, or state constitutions. Sometimes judges can be persuaded to override local and state statutes and regulations if the defendants present a clear defense appealing to the broad freedoms of religion, speech, press and public assembly guaranteed in the U.S. and state constitutions.
Over the years I won cases when I showed judges that the facts did not support conviction, that the law under which I was charged did not match the facts or the description of my conduct as charged in the police complaint, or that the arrest was for actions protected by the Constitution of the United States or a state constitution.
At my trial in 2001 for illegal re-entry to Fort Benning the prosecutor presented seven witnesses, yet none testified to the actual time, place or circumstances of my individual arrest.
The testimony of the witnesses did not support a conviction. I also made an eloquent constitutional defense based on the freedom to assemble at a base that is otherwise open 24 hours a day 365 days a year for every other kind of normal activity, many not privileged by the Constitution, yet Judge Faircloth still found me guilty without any explanation of his reasoning, and imposed the maximum sentence of six months.
This led me to a key piece of advice in my memo: No defendant whether pro se or represented by a lawyer should naively assume that a judge will conscientiously follow the law, the Constitution, or accepted legal procedures of the American judicial system. Defendants may be convicted when they have committed no illegal acts, or they may be acquitted for various reasons even though they may have committed an act that was illegal.
My memo concluded by saying that anyone new to pro se defense could benefit greatly from discussing their case thoroughly with experienced pro se defendants or lawyers familiar with civil protest cases, although sometimes discussions with lawyers who do not have practical experience with such cases can be misleading rather than helpful. Over the last thirty-four years since I first started representing myself and pleading not guilty in most nonviolent civil action cases, a count of my trial record showed that I pleaded guilty seven times and not guilty twenty-nine times.
Of those cases, twelve were dismissed before trial on motion of the prosecutor or judge because they didn't want to prosecute or felt that a conviction would not be warranted. I was acquitted in eight cases, convicted in eight others, and had one outstanding warrant for a case in which I did not return for trial.
After the preparatory briefings and meetings I did not stay in Columbus for the trials which extended for a whole week. Of thirty-seven defendants only one was found not guilty, on what grounds, I don't know. The rest were convicted by Judge Faircloth and sentenced from six months of probation to six months in prison. Most reported at federal prisons when notified, but five went into custody immediately and began their sentences in Georgia county jails.
The work of the legal team led by Bill Quigley was particularly commendable in this case, and Bill would go on to provide thoughtful and effective representation and help for civil protest defendants in many other cases around the country in subsequent years.
Postscript
How shall I summarize my life?
From my early childhood awareness of the political world I aspired to make human cultures better for all people. From early adulthood I tried earnestly to contribute my best toward that goal, even as I learned progressively how little of my early aspirations could be achieved.
I made a few significant, though modest, contributions to education about pacifism and nonviolence, especially in enabling movements for nonpayment of military taxes. It's not possible to know how many people have been influenced and changed by my writings in many movement newsletters, and by my personal example in nonviolent action, and, in recent years, the Nashville Greenlands model for simple living and urban agriculture.
Briefly in the late 1980s, when Mikhail Gorbachev initiated agreements to end the “Cold War”, and dissolve the Soviet empire and the Warsaw Pact, it seemed the world was headed toward great power cooperation and a new international order that might decrease wastage of world resources on military competition. Even Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush, long-time military hawks, seemed to embrace this vision.
I was deeply encouraged by these developments, but too soon our illusions faded. As I write this in 2015, the military/industrial/Presidential/Congressional/media complex in the United States is provoking both Russia and China toward a renewal of cold war hostilities, by forming military alliances with countries all around their borders, and encircling them with U. S. military bases and missile systems.
Yet, through all these years, my own personal life has been rewarding and modestly successful in most respects. Over the last eighteen years, since I moved to Nashville and settled on the land in the urban core, we have restored neglected parts of our neighborhood and developed a vibrant community of dedicated young activists. We have tried to illustrate how people might live together in cities in symbiotic and sustainable relationship, with a minimum of harm to one another, or to the ecological fabric of our mother Earth.
A Millennial Challenge
If we have vision enough to see even a few years ahead into this new millennium, we will surely see that the great problem for humanity's future in Earth will be the biological burden of human population on the carrying capacity of Earth.
The watchwords of the last several centuries were human energy, economic growth, expansion, development. The imperative choices for this century are to slow down, consume less, pay close attention to the ecological health of the living garment of Earth's surface. If we don't do this, we will surely face ecological disasters.
The conventional ideology of all our governing elites is that we should travel faster, work harder, produce more, and work our way out of the economic dilemmas of society. The ecology of Earth's systems is warning us that this is dangerous folly.
Well over half, perhaps as much as eighty or ninety percent of all economic and social activity in the developed countries of the world may be wasteful, destructive or harmful to our present and future viability within Earth. It will be a complex scientific and social challenge to distinguish and separate harmful work from useful work, innocent play from destructive play.
Solving this problem demands that we slow down and think. Why are we importing petroleum from Arabia, halfway around the world, to power planes, ships and trucks to import household “goods” and food from China, Hawaii, Australia, Guatemala, California?
Why are we planting most urban landscapes in yard grass, then mowing it weekly with gasoline driven machines, instead of planting much of it in fruits and vegetables that we could gather from our own yards, vines and trees?
Why do we light government and commercial buildings with trillions of kilowatts at night when we are not using them? There are thousands of such things that we do through social habit without ever thinking seriously about their economic and environmental costs.
The destructive and the useful are deeply intertwined in most of our jobs. In the present economic system, it would be impossible to do the useful and necessary, without also doing some wasteful and destructive work. Only by patient and attentive care could we together untangle these threads and reweave the useful fabric of a thoroughly compassionate and ecologically sustainable culture.
As I saw at the beginnings of my own social consciousness, militarism and war are the most wasteful and destructive human activities, and, in my sixty years of engagement, the most urgent to address.
For those who may read this book the challenge will remain to abolish war, foster economic and social cooperation rather than military competition among all nations, and, meanwhile, to examine every other human activity and evaluate how it may be reformed and woven into a symbiotic place in a pattern of Earth, in which we no longer harm one another.
The watchwords of the last several centuries were human energy, economic growth, expansion, development. The imperative choices for this century are to slow down, consume less, pay close attention to the ecological health of the living garment of Earth's surface. If we don't do this, we will surely face ecological disasters.
The conventional ideology of all our governing elites is that we should travel faster, work harder, produce more, and work our way out of the economic dilemmas of society. The ecology of Earth's systems is warning us that this is dangerous folly.
Well over half, perhaps as much as eighty or ninety percent of all economic and social activity in the developed countries of the world may be wasteful, destructive or harmful to our present and future viability within Earth. It will be a complex scientific and social challenge to distinguish and separate harmful work from useful work, innocent play from destructive play.
Solving this problem demands that we slow down and think. Why are we importing petroleum from Arabia, halfway around the world, to power planes, ships and trucks to import household “goods” and food from China, Hawaii, Australia, Guatemala, California?
Why are we planting most urban landscapes in yard grass, then mowing it weekly with gasoline driven machines, instead of planting much of it in fruits and vegetables that we could gather from our own yards, vines and trees?
Why do we light government and commercial buildings with trillions of kilowatts at night when we are not using them? There are thousands of such things that we do through social habit without ever thinking seriously about their economic and environmental costs.
The destructive and the useful are deeply intertwined in most of our jobs. In the present economic system, it would be impossible to do the useful and necessary, without also doing some wasteful and destructive work. Only by patient and attentive care could we together untangle these threads and reweave the useful fabric of a thoroughly compassionate and ecologically sustainable culture.
As I saw at the beginnings of my own social consciousness, militarism and war are the most wasteful and destructive human activities, and, in my sixty years of engagement, the most urgent to address.
For those who may read this book the challenge will remain to abolish war, foster economic and social cooperation rather than military competition among all nations, and, meanwhile, to examine every other human activity and evaluate how it may be reformed and woven into a symbiotic place in a pattern of Earth, in which we no longer harm one another.
